


Anamnesic Tissue

by circopoi (cicadabug)



Series: Caustic Echo [1]
Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Blink And You Miss It Slash, Blood and Gore, Caustic Echo, Gen, Hurt/A tiny bit of comfort, I mean there's also fluff here, POV Harry du Bois, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Torture, Whump, Wordcount: 5.000-10.000, dick mullen and vic heron fight gangsters, its not ALL grimdark avenue, jeangst, pre-disco harry is a piece of shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:20:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26891329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicadabug/pseuds/circopoi
Summary: You're a scarred man—everybody and their mother knows it. Inside and out, you've been dealt your fair share of blows by the world. But three weeks after Martinaise, you realize you don't know what your backside looks like. You don't know where most of the markings on your body come from, or who created them.Kim Kitsuragi offers an brief explanation for one stretching across your knuckles. Old hurts, you think. They don't matter anymore, thanks to that new and improved blank-slate brain of yours.But, on the other side of Jamrock, your ex-partner Jean Vicquemare remembers the story of the scar, too much for his own good.
Relationships: Harry Du Bois & Jean Vicquemare, Harry Du Bois & Kim Kitsuragi
Series: Caustic Echo [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1961947
Comments: 12
Kudos: 39





	1. Sunset, Parabellum

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the first fic of the Caustic Echo canon! This is a post-canon universe in which people forget and cities remember. Comments and kudos prized and beloved and appreciated!

SPRING ‘51 - VALLEY OF DOGS

Kim splashes alcohol on the cut slicing diagonally over the curve of your shoulder. He cups his hand over it so the fumes don’t reach your nose—he knows what neural pathways would’ve ignited. You’ve done this many times, and he’s done this many times. But it’s not enough that your breath doesn’t catch.

“Easy, there,” he says, as he wipes the excess away with clean gauze. The rickety hostel bed shifts and dents as he adjusts his kneeling position behind you.

The burning cut in your shoulder reduces to a dull simmer. Outside, through the open window, the distant firecracker pops of pistolettes banter with one another. Even so, the evening sky remains serene and periwinkle-blue and bloodless. Kim pauses; the air moves as he jerks his head up.

“Should we be doing something about that?” You squint into the sky.

“That was old musket fire, if I’m not mistaken.” 

Your fingers mold around the phantom shape of a Belle-Magrave rifle trigger. Long, cold metal. A leonine boom as opposed to the delicate lightning-cracks of your Villiers and Kim’s Armistice. “Think so.”

“Then no. It’s probably another riot—that’s mostly for INSURCOM now, not us. And thank god for that.” 

March is almost over. The first bloodlettings have begun, just as the city told you they would.

Kim digs through the first-aid kit behind you. You turn to look but your wound strains—pain lances up your neck. An embarrassing yelp escapes your lips.

“I said take it easy,” he says.

“I’m taking it extremely easy, alright? *You* take it easy.”

“I *could* be taking it easy right now if we went back to Gottlieb. But ‘no, Kim, it’s paramount to the investigation that you patch me up with your bare hands as a *male bonding experience*. Absolutely paramount.’” 

“Did you memorize that just so you could mock me with it?”

“No. I wrote it down in my notes so I could mock you with it,” he says. Is he serious? You’ve been partners for three weeks, and you still can’t tell when he’s serious.

“Fine, forget the male bonding experience. Evidence is degrading as we speak. What if we come back tomorrow and it’s totally gone?”

“Evidence doesn’t just *disappear.* Unless you’re the one who destroyed it—and then, yes, it can supra-naturally dissolve into thin air.” 

Quick, think of something. “...There’s dogs. In the valley, that is. We’re in the Valley of Dogs. Dogs eat meat, right?” 

He pauses, cold fingers prodding at your inflamed skin. “Fair enough. But only because there’s actual wild dog packs in the area—be ready, detective.” He holds the even colder needle against your flesh. You nod. He pushes it in with one smooth motion, and your jaw clenches. Your fingers grip the edges of the mattress. He talks, partially to distract you and partially to soothe the trembling in his own fingers. “You don’t get to use the dogs excuse anywhere else in the city.”

“But—” You grunt. The needle weasels under your skin again, cold and brilliant, trailing the pulling sensation of string. The pain swallows whatever retort you had planned. “Whatever,” you grumble. You wipe the dampness from your forehead with another hand.

A quietness clogs the room as Kim squints at the cut on your shoulder, timing the strokes of the needle with each deliberate breath, drawing the string in and out, pulling the edges of the slice back together. You’ve got your eyes trained onto the open window, watching the sky slip imperceptibly into another color, and then another. The sun sets, but the investigation doesn’t sleep. You’ll go out tonight after this.

Finally, the quick snipping of scissors breaks the silence. Kim sweeps the extra string from your shoulder and dabs at the blood. He scoots back to admire his handiwork. 

“You’re all set,” he says, and pauses. “Hmm.”

“What?”

“Nothing. You have a lot of scars is all.”

“I do? Like, on my back?” You wouldn’t know. The other side of your torso exists in a murky twilight of flesh-colored awareness. What you can’t see can’t hurt you, after all.

“Lots.” he says. You turn, slowly this time, to look at him again. His gaze traces down your spine, his eyebrows raised with half-assedly-concealed appreciation. “You wouldn’t happen to know where they come from, would you?—hold your hand here, now.” He pushes white gauze onto your shoulder and taps. You apply steady pressure into your shoulder.

“I didn’t know they were there until, like, now.”

“Ah, well …” A twinge of disappointment creeps into his voice. “Not only would they have made good drinking stories, it’s common for scars collected in service to be treated as badges of honor.” 

Like the rest of us, he thinks, you were proud of these markings once. Now they mean nothing to you. 

You return your gaze to the window in front of you. “... I bet Jean’d know where they came from.”

A silence from Kim, punctuated only by shuffling and the zipper of the first-aid kit closing. He dislikes any mention of the Satellite-Officer—no, dislikes isn’t the right word. You don’t understand it enough to describe it. It makes him pensive and quiet and tense, almost dangerously, settles over him like night smog over a city. Makes him think about something the voices in your head can’t recognize. 

The can-opener demon within you salivates… but you’re already juggling enough interpersonal mysteries. You add it to your mental “Ask Kim” list.

“I agree.” Kim remembers to reply. “Some of these newer scars are messy, likely sutured by an untrained hand—well, not as trained as Gottlieb. Vicquemare might have been responsible for several of these... *male bonding experiences*.” There’s a light, sheepish poke halfway down your spine. “Sorry. You don’t mind if I take a closer look at these, do you?” He adds hurriedly: “As we wait for the bleeding to stop.”

“Go ahead, you probably have a better idea of how I got them. I’ve got a bunch of random cool scars all over the place that I don’t know the source of.” 

Light fingers brush past the numb, raised segments of your skin. Kim’s fingertips angle the flesh of your back towards the lamplight. You lose track of the number of bumps that interrupt the movement of his hand.

“Check out this one on my hands,” you say. You swivel the knuckles of your left hand toward him and wiggle your fingers. He takes your hand and holds it at a distance comfortable for his eyes. “You see those giant horizontal scars across the third knuckles?”

He pushes his glasses up and runs his thumb along the scars, flips your hand over—a bit frantically?—to scan the underside of the knuckles, and, affirming something to himself, turns your palm back over. 

“What, what’s wrong?”

“Detective, do you want to know what this is?” he says, brows drawn, his words measured and careful.

“You know what happened?”

“I have a guess. Scars like these pop up now and then on officers, but usually there’s… ” 

“Stuff on the underside?”

“That's right. Also, they usually heal cleaner. These scars… they’re massive.”

“Then what’s it mean?”

He shoots a glance behind him, at the door, before he continues. “It’s the Mazda gang’s interrogation MO. They tried to cut off your fingers… but only got halfway.”


	2. Reduce Me to Nothingness

SUMMER ‘48 - VILLALOBOS

The muscled Mesque gangster jets fumes of nicotine from his nostrils as he shoves you through a wooden door. It collapses inward on impact, no match for your combined momentum. Through the haze of smoke and dust and the pain of your cheek hitting the earth—and who are you kidding, the double whammy of ethanol and crank rushing across your flimsy blood-brain barrier—you can’t see anything. Nothing is clear but the cold kiss of metal against the base of your skull.

You cough the grime and blood-smell from your lungs. “That’s no way to treat a guest, *hom-bre*.” You botch up the pronunciation as much as you can. A meaty hand traps your arms behind your back and crushes you into the ground.

The dust settles, and a man chuckles behind the desk in front of your face. 

“Lieutenant, what are you talking about?” he says. He’s, what, 40, 50? Intense, almost comical Mesque flavor to his words. Hoarse from smoking. The flow of his speech deliberate and controlled, likely higher up in the chain of command. Talks like a fictional character, really. Probably doing something stupid and cliche like castling his hands and nodding. Maybe twirling a mustache if he’s got one. “We’ve been treating you very well.” 

“Yeah, yeah, I shouldn’t have prompted you. We both read too much pulp fiction—so let’s cut to the chase,” you sputter, lips against the dirt. “What do you need me to tell you?”

“What’s the rush, Mr. Du Bois? You haven’t experienced our *hospitality* yet.”

Your head throbs and, oh god, you really, really don’t have time for this. “Look, man. I know what happens. Can we just skip all this posturing? I’m a cop — I know how you guys do business.”

“You’re quite observant, Mr. Du Bois,” he crows. “A prized quality in our law—”

“Okay, yeah—I get it. What do you *want* from me?”

A disappointed pause. “You’re inebriated.”

“Or maybe I’m just fucking *loco*.” The alcohol numbs your lips and lets you butcher even the simplest of Mesque words. Lau-fucking-cau. 

The muzzle digs harder into the base of your skull. “Yes, he’s inebriated,” your handler says.

“Hey, fuck you. I’m like this sober too.”

The man listens to your heaving breaths, to the heaving hot breaths of the Mesque man you had an advantage over in an earlier scuffle until, in the haze of the battle, you somehow lost your gun. But your pistolette would be useless now, anyway, against his semiautomatic. 

In the corner of your eye a dark figure on a chair squirms against their restraints. Probably another detainee lined up for interview. 

“Pull him up. He wants to cut to the chase? We will cut to the chase.” His voice drips with dismay. He had a badass opening gesture, and you ruined it. You ruin everything, and that’s why they hired you. Collateral damage, that’s what they call you. Area of effect.

“Finally—” You grunt as the man jerks you up to a kneeling position. The man behind the counter is exactly how you envisioned—but he’s white.

“Hey, hold on a moment. Why are you white?”

He looks to your handler for answers. “I don’t… see how that’s relevant.”

You take another look. You were mostly on point: late forties, looks every bit like a pulp-fic gangster—except, you know, white—*impeccably* gelled hair slicked back into a topknot. Green vest. Iron rings line every finger, but the shaft of sunlight transmutes them into blinding gold, and yes. He’s castling his hands.

A box of cigars on the desk; a half-finished glass of whiskey, no ice. Behind him, on the bookshelf, a row of Dick Mullen novels: every volume of the Cartel Arc. So *that’s* why he’s… like that.

“Do you even speak Mesque?”

“That doesn’t matter. Let’s cut to the chase.”

“So *now* you want to cut to the chase?”

“We are cutting to the chase. Like you *asked*. Is this some sort of joke to you?” His forced Mesque accent slips as he raises his voice.

“It wasn’t—but it is now. It’s fucking hilarious, man. You’re fucking hilarious.”

He throws his hands up. “You know what—”

“You’re racist? Yeah, it’s okay. You can come clean here, I’m racist too. Racist solidarity.”

The Mesque man behind you takes a handful of your hair—

The man behind the desk raises his hand and breathes deep. “No, Miguel. It’s alright. He’ll learn the meaning of *respect* later. And no, I’m not a racist.”

“So you know that you don’t have to be like this, right? Like it’s not helping me take you seriously. Racist-to-racist, here’s some advice: you don’t have to be hilariously Mesque to be.. I don’t know, fearsome—or whatever the hell it is you want to be. Look at Miguel over—”

His face falls. “Alright, shut him up.”

A hand on the back of your head crushes your skull into the edge of the table. The room distorts around you and your knees weaken. 

He gestures to the leather cuffs screwed onto the table. “Do you know what these are for?”

You raise your head despite the throbbing. “Yeah.” 

He squints at you. You squint back.

“So, f****t, can I put my hands in them now or are you gonna keep checkin’ me out?” you spit.

Behind you, the restrained figure gives a muffled groan through their gag. You turn your head—something about that voice *makes* you turn your head—but Miguel slams your head into your desk again, sending shockwaves through your skull. 

“Face forward,” he barks. The muzzle of the gun threatens to crush the vertebral poking under the soft skin of your neck. 

But joke’s on him. The room’s already been spinning for you from the moment you barged in, and you’ve had a headache for three years running. The first part of a standard Mazda interrogation—the brain damage, the induced vomiting—is something you do to yourself every night. Any more would be redundant. You grin at the man in the chair in front of you.

“Stop wasting my time. Put my hands in the cuffs.”

He scans you, lips pursed in disbelief. He’s a by-the-book guy, like every other lackey that tries to sell off as a dime-novel villain. He’s got protocols: if the detainee looks weak, go for positive confrontation, strike a deal. If the detainee’s strong-willed but scared, terrorize them a bit more. Beat them up. But those protocols never account for a crazy bastard like you. 

You’re unpredictable to him, and it wears down on his composure. He can’t read you. More importantly, he doesn’t know how to use you.

“Do it,” he says, slightly hesitant. 

Miguel slams your wrists on the edge and straps you to the desk, enough to restrain you but not enough to cut off circulation—to give you a real bloody show later on. But see, you prepared for this: you wore a watch today, with a stack of washers glued to a specific spot on the inside. A bit of struggling against the bindings, some pushing against the edge of the leather strap, and you know that they aren’t tight enough for what you’ve got planned.

The man in the green suit opens a drawer and retrieves a small, impossibly sharp knife, its delicate serrated teeth perfectly polished. He opens his mouth, likely to introduce it, and then closes it, deciding otherwise.

He aligns the knife with your left knuckles. Miguel picks up a pen and paper.

“Names and addresses for all Tourney case witnesses.” 

You smile. “Nah.”

“You… understand how this works, no?”

“Yeah. You’re gonna cut off my fingers no matter what I spout and give them back to me if you like what I say. You don’t gotta *break it down* for me.” You glance down. “Oh, yeah, you should tighten the cuffs a bit. I could slip outta here by breaking my thumbs.”

He glances at your restraints. You’re not wrong. The cuffs give a bit of leeway the exact width of your hand—if your thumb bone was broken. You mime crushing your hand against the table as a demonstration. You’ll do it, bitch.

Another grunt from behind you. You turn—even though you know you’ll get your head bashed in—and you get your head bashed into the table. Again. The blood trickles down your forehead and you blink it out of your eyes. “I said face forward!” Miguel shouts.

After an exasperated sigh, the green-suited man motions to tighten the straps enough to cut off the bloodflow. You press your wrist into the washers and feel your fingertips begin to tingle. Something about the median nerve, you remember. You did your research this morning and don’t recall half of it.

“I’ll ask one more time. Names and addresses for all Tourney case witnesses.”

“Just saw my fucking fingers off already. You’ll do it whatever I say.” 

He looks into your eyes and takes your limp fingers in his. “Such useful fingers…”

“I don’t even jerk off with that hand.” 

He ignores that comment. “We will get to your right hand soon. Are you sure you want to—”

“My *god.* I’m begging you. Saw them off. Liberate me from these useless meat tubes. I’ve been dying to lose these fingers for so long.”

Rage and confusion flicker across the man’s face. 

“Sir…” says Miguel, grabbing another fistful of your hair.

“No, no. He’s concussed enough as it is. Very well, Du Bois. You made your choice.”

His grip tightens on the knife. Your heart rate rises against your will, coursing down your arm and disappearing as it passes through your wrist. You sweat. His sleeve brushes past your index finger, and it’s like cold meat, sensationless, disconnected from you all but physically.

The knife moves across the space above your knuckles, slowly, pink gashes appearing in its wake like contrails from an airship. The gashes deepen with each stroke and fill with red. 

Behind you, the gagged figure struggles, bucks, attempts to scream, collides with the wooden walls of the tenement. Rhythmic tapping of a boot on the ground. The air gusting as Miguel barrels past you. The dull thump of a limb colliding with a torso, a wet grunt, and then no more tapping.

The pain hits you several seconds later, rippling through you in nauseous waves, and you heave but you can’t puke because there’s nothing in you. You bite your cheek until it bleeds and you know you’re shaking like a small dog in the cold but you level your eyes with his cold green ones. You don’t ever stop grinning. Tears burn in your eyes and you let them fall and splatter onto the mess underneath. 

Dora would be impressed if she were here, wouldn’t she? She loved watching you through the glass panes of the gym as you crushed your fists against the sandbags. It hurt, but the way she looked at you… 

You’re a tough guy. You’re a *cool* guy. This is nothing compared to what you’d do for her. 

Blood drips off the edge of the desk, softly pattering on the dusty earth. 

Behind you, the figure hits the ground, chair included.

The knife begins to meet resistance from bone. It grinds, vibrates up your forearms and into your shoulder. You grin harder, and the man begins to look uneased. You should be crying and screaming and pissing yourself right now, but you aren’t. He thinks you’ve got the pain tolerance of a Safrian spy. He thinks you might have undergone time in the Safrian intelligence forces. Really, you’re just deadened and doped up so hard you can’t remember doing it to yourself.

This is nothing compared to what she did to you.

“I can stop now if you—”

“No.” You spit blood onto blood. Your voice, though trembling, continues. “Keep going. And saw my hands off next. Cut all of it off. Reduce me to nothingness.” You lean in to push the last two words through your teeth. “*Kill* me.”

The struggling behind you continues, and the man’s eyes flash past you. The motion of the knife ceases. 

“Change of plans. Miguel, bring the other one over. Cut his wrists loose.” He hands him the small knife.

You don’t know what you expected. A damsel-in-distress? A Villalobos local? But the man Miguel dumps on his knees next to you is rigid, well-built, with lustrous dark hair coated with dust on one side and a pockmarked, gaunt face—discolored with bruising. A gag stretches across his mouth.

Your composure slips. Your heart stops. The barometric pressure in the room plummets. No, no. It’s not possible. It’s...

“...Jean?”


	3. Only Thirty-One — And Crumbling

Jean doesn’t look at you or the mess at your palms, instead staring straight ahead. Somewhere inside him, under the fear-induced paralysis, anger roils.

Miguel flicks the knife against the gag and Jean spits it out. 

“Harry, you’re a fucking idiot, you know that? You’re an entire fucking idiot,” Jean snarls, voice hoarse from trying to yell through the gag.

“Watch and learn, Miguel,” The man in the green suit spreads his arms. He wipes the knife and his hands with a dark cloth and lights a cigar. “Hostages will always be more useful than corpses.”

You buck against the cuffs. “Let him go. He didn’t work on Tourney. He doesn’t know anything. He shouldn’t—he shouldn’t even be in here.” You turn to him. “Why *are* you here?” 

“Pryce told me to find you, fuckface!” Jean roars, struggling against Miguel’s grip. “Tourney is fucking finished; it’s going to the courts tomorrow — what the hell do you think *you’re* doing here?!”

“I’m tying up loose—”

“Shut up,” Miguel presses the knife against Jean’s throat. “I’ll hurt him.”

The man behind the desk takes a drag. “Now, Du Bois. This man means something to you, no? He is a reasonable man I see. Not *loco* like you. Too bad he doesn’t make the decisions.” A smile spreads across the man’s lean face. Smoke filters from the seams in between his teeth.

Cold sweat slithers down your neck. “...Let him go. I’ll talk.”

“Don’t you fucking dare. You’re not saying a word, you hear me?! They’ll die if you do!” Jean roars. Miguel presses the knife harder to his throat, and he tilts his head up to avoid the blade. Breath spews from his nose in short, panicked spurts.

The green-suited man takes another drag and lays his cigar over his glass of whiskey. He stands, brushes the summer Villalobos dust from his suit, and loosens the leather straps from their buckles. Now unobstructed, blood gushes forth from the gashes in your fingers, puddling and dripping from the table like spilled wine. Your hand doesn’t regain feeling yet, but it’s beginning to tingle—a countdown timer until you collapse from the pain. 

He points the gun at you. “Stand up. Hands above your head.”

You comply, and the floor drops from underneath you as blood surges away from your head. The warmth from your hand streams and soaks into your sleeve.

He swings the barrel toward Jean’s head. “Play any games and I will kill him. No running or sudden movements. Miguel, you may bind the next one…” His gaze trails up to your wrist. “And not so tight, this time.” 

Your eyes skirt around as Miguel buckles Jean to the table, looking for something, anything. Free weapons? Miguel leaves the knife on the table when he straps him in. The whiskey glass makes a fine projectile in a pinch. But even so, you can’t do anything while the green-suited man holds the barrel to Jean’s skull.

“You don’t have to do this. I’ll tell—I’ll tell you everything.” The heady taste of blood marks each word you speak. “Carlos Ferreira. 78 Coriander Road. Marlene Santano. 24B Estados Aven—”

“Harry, shut the fuck up! Don’t say anything,” Jean snaps. He gazes up at you with his wild grey eyes now. His shoulders heave with each breath but he bites it down, forcing himself to inhale longer and deeper. “It’ll be okay… I’ll be okay. You were okay, weren’t you?” The most pathetic, watery smile distorts his face.

You stand there frozen, totally useless, your heart exploding from your chest and leaking out of the wounds in your left hand, as Miguel finishes binding Jean to the table. The green-suited man lowers the gun. 

“Run and he dies,” he says. 

He grins, satisfied with the look on your face, settles into his chair again, and breathes another drag of his cigar. He leans the rifle against the wall behind him. “Now, now. We’re ready, now. This is what will happen, Du Bois. You will give Miguel the names and addresses. I will take a finger from this man. Maybe two, or three, depending on how much time you waste. If the data is correct, he will get it back. If it isn’t… “ He puffs smoke. “No interruptions this time?”

You nod. Somewhere, at the end of your arm, your hand tingles, a fast-approaching tidal wave of crushing static.

He wipes the knife on the cloth once more and holds Jean’s left hand in place. You bite back another plea.

Jean squirms. His body tenses and locks down but his sympathetic nervous system wins out and his muscles tremble and sweat beads on his forehead. 

The blade draws closer to his hand. The man smiles as it shudders uncontrollably, its veins bulging and muscles taught. “Hm, which one?” He taps each digit lightly with the point of the blade, smiling even more with each involuntary twitch of Jean’s fingers. “I will start with the pinky.”

Your hands make fists, then release. Blood slaps the ground underneath your arm in irregular spurts. The drugs send live electricity into your fingertips, make them twitch—you need to fight, right now. You can tackle Miguel, but the knife would slice upwards and carve open Jean’s throat before you landed the first blow. You could dive for the gun, but Miguel would grab it before you and splatter Jean’s brains on the wall. The door gapes open—you could… run. And Jean would die. 

There’s nothing you can do but tend to his wounds when it’s ov—

The nerve in your wrist stretches open—the pain in your hand shatters you with full force. You lurch over and vomit nothing. Jean flinches, watches you pant and grimace and bury your broken hand in your chest, but snaps his head around in time for the first cut.

Even under the beard, his jaw bulges. He gazes forward, flitters of expression twitching in his face. You can’t watch this.

“I’ll tell you!” you yell. “Just—”

“No. Don’t fucking look, Harry.”

But you look; you have to look; your eyes stretch themselves open and lock on the faultline, the event horizon at the edge of the blade. You don’t deserve to shield yourself.

Red blooms across the finger and spills over the table. Jean’s teeth crunch down on the fabric of his shoulder and he forces his eyes shut. The grind of metal and bone. 

Through the haze of your own agony, you see his resolve break. His teeth slip into his lip and he howls, so far away yet so deafeningly close. His forehead presses down into the edge of the table, shoulders jerking and twitching, blood and snot dripping from his mouth and splattering on the ground. His right hand claws across the table; shallow scratches run across the wood.

Nausea overwhelms you again and liquifies your legs. Your knees slap against the ground. God, he’s so young—only thirty-one, and crumbling. You were supposed to protect him, and now you’re dumped here useless with all your fingers intact.

He weeps. You watch, your own eyes brimming but your hand flattened over your nose and mouth, sealing the sobs inside your ribcage. 

And it’s over, as the knife draws across the wood with a slimy scrape. Jean’s breath rattles; small desperate gasps accompany each hitch and tremor. Dark liquid from the horrible void between his knuckle and his finger runs into his hair and down his sleeves. You’re lucky his head buries itself behind his arms. If you had to watch him cry... 

The man in the green suit wipes the knife on the cloth and smirks down at you. “Mr. Du Bois. I hope that was to your satisfaction.” He leans back to clean the underneath of his fingernails with a corner of the cloth. “Names and addresses?”

Miguel readies the pen against the page as you brush the mucus and wetness from your face. Your voice chokes. “Carlos.. Carlos Ferreira. 78 Cor—”

“*No.*” A haggard, gurgling wail of a syllable. Jean raises his head, muscles straining against exhaustion. Blood runs down his chin. 

“Jean.. please.”

“What’s this?” the man says. “Are you going to waste my time? Was one finger not enough for you?”

The gasps and grunts choking out from his lungs threaten to pull him down again, but Jean maintains a brilliant, hateful beam of eye contact with the man. He rears back and spits a glob of blood and mucus into his eyes.

“*Fuck you*.” Jean coughs—the man squawks and brings his hands to his face—and bares his teeth, red seeping into the fissures of his gums.

After the man wipes his eyes clean, he sighs. Wordlessly, he slips the knife out and holds it against Jean’s pale fingers yet again. Your mouth runs dry.

“No,” you say. “No, please. No more. He’ll—”

But Jean is still. He looks to you, eyes like wet dimes, pleading, face blotchy yet bloodless. He’s apologizing, but why? For what? His head cocks almost imperceptibly toward Miguel, who looks away from the table. 

You don’t have a choice but to nod. Whatever he’s cooking, you’re ready for it. Your hand cracks and splinters as you form it into a loose fist. The speed blazes through your veins, soft and pulsing like trapped butterflies. 

You allow yourselves one deep breath in unison. 

Like a taut rubber band cut loose, you launch up from the ground and punch Miguel in the jaw. 

Jean yanks his hand to the left and slams his forehead down onto the man’s grip—with a devastating *crunch*—

Bringing the knife down on—no, straight through—his thumb. 

It flips up and rolls off across the table.

The man reflexively loosens his grip and shouts. Jean’s remaining three fingers curl around the knife and squirrel out from the binding, red faucets thumbless and nimble. 

Miguel stumbles back to regain his balance but you’re already in the air and your heel whips forward and crushes his temple.

A spray of blood and a rabid yowl—as Jean surges up and slashes the knife across the green-suited man’s eyes.

You ram into Miguel and wrap your hands around his neck and dig your thumbs down into the soft tissues lining his throat until his face purples and the squirming under you stills. 

A few feet away, Jean shudders, blood spilling down the red welt on his forehead, and jerks the knife along the second binding but the knife falls from his jittery, slippery hand so he claws at the buckle with his three bitten nails, fever in his eyes and his lungs pumping the breath in and out of him like a locomotive engine. And time’s up. 

He crumples, clutching his hand, and screams—only to gurgle halfway and vomit over his lap. 

You grab the cloth and press it to the stumps of his left hand, but you can’t keep it there because your left hand is floppy and useless, the bones sawed in half and fragile, the nerves refusing to do anything but fire blinding pain signals, over and over. You try to unbuckle his right hand but it’s slipping as well and there’s blood everywhere. Jean hyperventilates next to you, face contorted, staring furiously into the ground.

You shake his shoulder. “Jean. Jean,” you say. No response. “Jean. We can slow down. They’re not… getting back up soon.”

Jean looks up, eyes empty, and watches the blood seep from your hand into his shoulder. “You need to.. the blood,” he stammers. He clamps the cloth in his teeth, dangles it over his good hand, and yanks his head away to rip it, little by little. 

Your head pounds and your thoughts slow, but there’s something you need to do. Something important. Look around, Harry. You’ve stained this place with red. What’s not red? There—two pale sausage-looking lumps lie in the pool of blood across the table from you. Both are still warm when you pocket them. You take the cigar as well and suck on its embers to clear your brain.

“Are you f-fucking—are you serious right now?” Jean says, spitting the cloth from his mouth.

“You want a drag?”

His eyes linger on the glowing stub. “...Yeah...yeah.”

You stick the cigar in his mouth and he catches it with his teeth, takes a long inhale—hitched with intermittent hiccups—and lets the smoke waft from his nostrils as you pull the buckle loose and free his hand.

He wraps his stumps with cloth and tosses the other rag to you. You wind it across your left hand and secure it with a knot.

“This won’t be enough,” you say. You wipe your hand on your pants. “Grab the knife, I’ll get the gun.” Behind the desk, an anguished groan crawls from the throat of the blinded man. “We gotta leave now.” 

You burst through the doorway into the summer sunlight and both of you stagger in the brightness. Black spots dance in your eyesight and your one-handed grip on the rifle loosens.

“Fuck,” Jean says. The cigar threatens to tumble from his mouth. He sways and lurches toward the ground. You take his elbow, as much as you can with your mangled hand.

“Hey. Hey, c’mon. We aren’t safe here. Stay with me.”

Abandoned construction site. Chainlink fence. No movement but for the whistling of the wind through the wild lavender beyond the fence. 

“Where’s…” He swallows the blood in his mouth. “Where’s our guns?” he says.

“Not now. We need to get you to a hospital.”

“Yeah. Yeah. We’ll come back.”

A hole in the fence lets you out onto a small road. You crawl through first. Jean loses his balance as he wobbles through the broken chain-links, so you let him lean his forearm on your bloodied palm. You glare into the horizon so he doesn’t see you wince. Villalobos Central’s hivelike spires beckon from a distance. Nearer, though, a fueling station. You’ll be able to call for help with the phone there.

The sunlight pulls moisture away from red and pungent fluids, encrusting it on your faces; it wicks the cold sweat from both your shaking bodies.


	4. Bag of Fingers

The young Mesquito boy behind the counter screams as you crash through the door, blood smeared over the both of you. A bell jingles.

“Hey, kid, call the police,” you say. The kid freezes, eyes stuck on the barrel of your gun.

“¡Chama la policía!,” Jean roars, the cigar falling from his mouth, his teeth chattering. “The fuck are you waiting for?”

The boy snaps out of it. He dials the RCM number on the old gas station rotary phone and begins to bawl to the dispatch. You sit on the floor in a small mess of your own blood, and Jean joins you with a groan, letting his eyes slide shut, injured hand balanced on a bent knee. For a moment, there is no sound except soft crying from behind the counter and the ragged breaths of two men.

Now you have to deal with the fingers. 

There’s a baggie of amphetamines on you, you remember. You fish it out of your back pocket, tear it open with your teeth, and empty it into the red puddle on the ground before you realize what you’ve done. Fucking stupid bloodloss-addled brain. 

“Jean…. I just threw away my drugs.”

“Finally—this is what it takes?” 

“Shut up and ask the boy for a bigger plastic bag. For the fingers.” You’re coming down soon. You need to be alert and functional—Jean needs you to, if they barge in with guns and knives.

He’s beside you, forearm propped on the counter, his injured hand hidden behind his back, whispering to the boy. A tired smile paints his face. Mesque words drop here and there. “Baggie,” he says. “Por medicamento.”

Yeah, no. You scoop up what’s left of the little pile of speed from the ground with your pinky and tilt your head back and draw it into your sinuses and feel it ignite in your veins. The edges and curves of the world sharpen around you; every beat of your heart twists the pain of your left hand into pleasure.

Oh, yeah, you superstar. You’re good to go for another few hours.

As Jean chatters with the boy, you dig the amputated fingers out of your jacket pocket and tear a square of fabric from the dark cloth bundling your knuckles. You hold the dismembered thumb up to the sunlight. The knife was sharp—the bone only fractured a bit before cleaving cleanly into two. Pink patterns splash faintly along one side of the thumb, where the blood coagulated as it lay on the desk. Dripping, sponge-like marrow lines the inside of the bone. “Hey, Jean, wanna know what the inside of your fingers look like?”

“No.”

You wiggle the digit in front of his face. “What, you scared? They’re like little ham sausages.” 

He jerks back and grits his teeth, averting his eyes. His abdomen contracts—he’ll throw up if you keep pushing, you useless screw-up.

You retract your hand. Guilt flutters up from within you, but you stamp it down as soon as you feel it. It’s his problem, not yours, that he can’t look at his own dismembered fingers. “Fucking pussy,” you mutter. You turn to the sobbing boy behind the counter. “Hey, kid, do you—”

“I’m gonna … fucking kill you, Harry.”

“Big talk for a pussy. What, they’re suddenly gross now that they’re not connected to you?” You wrap the fingers in fabric and stuff them in the bag. “Saddest shit I ever seen.”

A small hand dangles over the counter, clean plastic bag in hand. Jean thanks him and plucks it from its fingers.

Grunting and cursing, you rise to your feet and you fill it with ice from the soda fountain machine and drop the smaller baggie in it.

Jean watches you with reluctant interest. “You really know what you’re doing, huh?”

“Yeah.” You slump back to your spot by Jean, marked by a bloody assprint. “But I gotta save some work for Ol’ Gotty. He’s gonna love working overtime tonight.”

“No, I mean… you prepared. Did your research. Even wore a watch to do the... ” He lapses into exhaustion—or is the concussion clouding his memories? “...Uh, the fuckin’... the nerve thing—that was batshit *insane*…” He shakes his head and closes his eyes again, tilting his head back against the counter. “You were ready to have your fingers chopped off.”

“Yeah, well.” You shrug. “It’s not as insane as, y’know, actually chopping my fingers off.”

A small pause as he digests the compliment. “Did you even have a plan? Or…”

Yeah, you did. But you forgot it, you forgot why you came, and how are you supposed to tell him that? 

You insult him, that’s how. “Planning is for *dweebs*. Besides, everything worked out okay, didn’t it? We have all of our fingers—just… in various states of intact, I guess.” Your gaze flits through the aisles. Bags of chips, sunglasses.. you’re searching… a god needs his heavenly nectar. You twist around and slide up the counter and tap on the surface above you. “Hey, this place got any booze?” 

Jean opens a single eyelid, hooks a finger in your belt loop, and drags your ass back down with a wet squelch. “You’re concussed. And on speed, you stupid fuck. Sit down and bleed out like a normal person.”

So you do. You sit in the hellish heat radiating from his body and watch his chest rise and fall, intermittently interrupted with pained gasps. Living, breathing. Sweat gleams on his nose; blood gleams in his matted hair. What would it feel like—to splay your hand on his chest, to feel his heart throw itself against your palm, the thrumming engine of corrosive life soldiering on under your fingers, despite everything you’ve done to him? You set the bag of ice and digits in his lap and reach over to curl his bandaged hand around it. He sighs, but doesn’t open his eyes. The movement makes your head throb, even through the numbness of the buzz. Bile rises in your throat. God, coming down is gonna be hell… but you’re alive, and Jean’s alive. 

“You should’ve let me give him the info,” you murmur.

Jean looks at you through the seams between his eyelids. “No, I shouldn’t’ve. Basic ethics, Harry. Two fingers for six lives? Kind of a no-brainer.”

“Not to me,” you say. You want to say more, but nothing comes out of your mouth.

A dry snort. “Don’t pretend you believe that. You were drunk and high–you didn’t make any intelligent decisions.” He presses the bag to the bruising bump on his head. “You were a scared animal. You wanted to escape. That’s all it was.”

You can’t reply to that, and he knows. It’s why he said it. Jean tilts his head away from you and watches the sunlight fall through the bloodied panes of the doorway. A trail of red drips into the curve behind his ear. 

“If you really cared, you wouldn’t have come here,” he says.

\--

You don’t register the howling in the air as sirens until flickering reds and blues reflect off the metal tanks and handles of the fuel pumps outside. 

You elbow Jean awake. “Hey. Jean, they’re here.” He startles with a gasp, then blinks the crusted blood from his eyelashes. “Let’s get you up.”

“Harry? How.. how long was I out?” he whispers, voice hoarse. You recall, but a fog sits in your mind. You can barely remember why you’re here. Oh, right—you flip your wrist to check your watch, and another wave of agony shrieks up your knuckles, forcing a gust of hot air out of your nose.

“Never mind; it’s alright,” Jean says. “Couldn’t have been long. The ice is still here.” He shakes the plastic bag.

He groans and bends his knees, the dried blood flaking off his pants as he moves. You wrap an arm around his waist and help lift his torso off the ground. Brown flakes cascade off both of you to twirl and shift in the sunlight. Outside, the lights brighten and the sirens increase in volume until the floor shakes with their sound. Jean wobbles for a second as he rises from the floor, but his legs regain their sureness.

“I’m good; I can stand on my own,” he says. But your arm doesn’t move. “Really, Harry.”

Your arm still doesn’t budge. It coils tighter around him, despite the sweltering summer heat and the stench of festering blood, sweat, and vomit rising from him—most of all, despite every voice in your head telling you to stop. 

Your heads swivel—a blue motor carriage swerves into the gas station, almost overshooting the entrance into the driveway. Behind it, lights continue to flash—an ambulance? Another carful of policemen? It lurches to an abrupt stop in front of the door. Judit Minot’s earnest face pokes out from the carriage door before the car even fully brakes. She pales as she traces a path of blood into the store and scans the red smear across the door. Behind her, Trant Heidelstam squeezes out.

The warmth next to you shifts. Jean Vicquemare leans into your embrace, looking down into the dark footprints on the tile floors, letting you sink your fingers into his side and pull him closer. His heartbeat flutters in the taut muscles of his jaw; his lower lip trembles almost imperceptibly. 

The shadows lengthen. An eternity stretches between now and when the rest of the precinct vehicles file into the parking lot and Judit and Trant shove each other out of the way to tear the door off its hinges—when officers surround you and question you and the paramedics bark numbers at each other over the din. 

And in this eternity, you stand in the purifying rays of the orange sun. You boil as the drugs war with the pain over control of your nervous system. But you hold your arm around a man whose blood runs warmer than all three combined—who will, one day, forgive you for this.

You smile at him. He looks up, shadows under his eyes and bloodlessness bleaching the skin stretched over his cheeks. He smiles back.


	5. Lambskin

SPRING ‘51 - VALLEY OF DOGS

“So cops with fingers missing are the ones who didn’t rat. ”

Kim nods. “And ones with amputation scars are ones who did. Chances are, you won’t see those scars, and especially not the halfway scars you have. Officers tend to hide them under gloves—it’s a mark of shame. Which, if you ask me, is ridiculous and entirely undeserved.”

“So… I ratted?” 

Kim tilts his head, birdlike, and runs his thumb over the scars once again. “No, I don’t think you did. You have very high pain tolerance.” Granted, you aren’t the badass you used to be, but he’s seen you mash your fists against countless solid objects and tear your stitches dancing too hard.

“Though,” he continues, “I don’t think you need gloves. You’re quite infamous, even among criminal company—or so I’ve heard—for the amount of damage you’ll allow yourself to suffer. No one would think you would rat.”

“Then I beat them up instead, probably. Or maybe I smooth-talked my way out of it.” 

“I would say that’s unlikely, but… “ He smiles at you, the lamplight playing off his glasses. “You’re an unlikely man.” 

You pull your hand back from Kim’s and examine the white stripe across your fingers. The stretched tissue gleams as you rotate your fist, not unlike the way the RCM watermark on your jacket shimmers in sodium streetlight. 

“Damn straight,” you say. 

\--

SPRING ‘51 - LAKESIDE (JAMROCK CENTRAL)

Underneath your gloves, your fingers ache. 

You peel them off halfway to massage the joints. Around your thumb and pinky—the scars. Be careful not to touch them; don’t look at them; don’t think too hard about them. The memories will seep into your reality and you’ll be trapped there again. And by the time you realize you’re hunched over on the bench in the locker room, there’ll be vomit splashing from the hand you don’t remember clasping over your mouth.

But this time, a different memory ambushes you—warm and orange and sweet-smelling—an instant before your mind extinguishes it. Wait. What was that?

You scan around the locker room once more for other officers before you let yourself examine your hand again. Torson’s boisterous voice echoes in the hallway leading to the lobby, but it’s receding, not approaching. But you still can’t risk taking the gloves off: if you barf on your new armor, you’ll ruin it. People will ask questions. 

You shake your head out of the visored helmet and leave it upside-down in your locker for the sweat to dry. You unclasp the riot vest from your shoulders and hang it on the new rack on the side wall, alongside the others—the buckle resists; you haven’t broken it in yet. *Revachol Citizen’s Militia*, it says. *41 - J.V.* 

Forearm guards, shoulder pads—those go on hooks behind your locker door. Baton, in the shiny bin at the end of the row of peeling gray boxes. Thank the sweet gods for the Coalition and their suddenly-competent budgeting department. Just kidding: no amount of armor can buy Station 41’s allegiance.

The lightbulbs hum and crackle in the otherwise silent space. You settle yourself down on the bench and only now dare to run your thumb along the stripes encircling your fingers. 

The room floods with brilliant, soft sunlight, tumbling into flickers of red and blue. The churning of a slurpee machine somewhere behind you. Your clothes stiffen and smell warmly of blood and bile.

Somehow, in that moment, he knew you needed the support. You could’ve stood on your own, but another part of you would have crumbled. Or maybe he’s the one who needed it—you recall the desperation in the tightness of his muscles, his relief when you relented and let him support you. The small, lopsided grin across his bloodstreaked face, radiant in the dying sun. You could do nothing but smile back.

And the sun sets. A meager incandescence reforms the gray shapes of the lockers. You’re the only one who remembers now. 

You could remind him… but you also remember your days in the infirmary with him, when he came down hard and they wouldn’t pump any more substances in his body no matter how much he begged and cried. How he wouldn’t speak to you unless you held your hand behind your back—and the apologies. Endless muttered strings of apologies that, if you didn’t yell at him to shut up, twisted into aimless enraged snarling at you, at his ex, at the world, but mostly at himself. Thanks to him, the Tourney case was airtight and sublime, the two men he left lying in the dust were the missing links, and he was a star and a hero—and wasn’t it what he wanted from the start? 

But he didn’t care, not as long as those pale rings disfigured your hand. “No, please, it’s my fault,” you’d whisper to him, over and over, “I don’t blame you,” just so he’d let his stitches heal over for once.

It’s better that he forgets. It’s why you wear the gloves—well, it’s one reason among many. Your reputation doesn’t protect you like his does for him.

Now, for the first time in three years, you clutch the black lambskin gloves and place them back in the locker. You leave them nestled in the cradle of your overturned helmet, push the door in, and leave.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you want anything explored in this hub, please comment :3. If you have any thoughts in that brain of yours, please comment. I crave human interaction. :3
> 
> here is balls to da walls fanart by ravensa: [spoilers ch 5](https://twitter.com/ravensa_rah/status/1317790026130837504?s=21)


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